Juneteenth – Here Yesterday, Gone Tomorrow?
“Too many non-working holidays in America. It is costing our Country $BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to keep all of these businesses closed. The workers don’t want it either! Soon we’ll end up having a holiday for every once working day of the year. It must change if we are going to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” – the President
Everyone knows by now that the president is a man of constantly changing moods and opinions.
He supported Juneteenth in 2017-2020.
In 2017, he said it was “a historic day recognizing the end of slavery."
In 2020, he refused to hold a previously scheduled campaign rally in Oklahoma because it fell on the holiday, saying he “made Juneteenth very famous,” and "it's actually an important event, an important time. But nobody had ever heard of it."
Five years later, the president is expressing his true feelings.
He was never in favor of Juneteenth.
Once, it was politically expedient to lie, but now he can fearlessly express his predictably racist sentiments.
I wonder why the president has never expressed the same concerns about Confederate Memorial Day (also known as Confederate Heroes Day and Confederate Decoration Day), a holiday that was once recognized in twelve Southern states and is still observed in most of them.
Why doesn’t he rail against those “non-working holidays”?
Because to him and his regime, any holiday commemorating White insurrections is a day worth celebrating.
(Anyone else believe he would favor January 6 being declared a national holiday?)
At some point, he will turn his attention to Juneteenth and attempt to remove it as a national holiday.
Given the nature of the holiday, it would appropriate that the dangling carrot of a holiday that is Juneteenth be snatched away from us after a few years of celebrations.
Throughout its history, America has made an awful habit of dangling the promise of equal rights and equal opportunity to Black people only to snatch it away.
We were encouraged to participate in freeing the country from the British, but afterwards, slavery remained in place.
The country engaged in a Civil War because of slavery, but after a few years, Black Codes and Jim Crow laws erased all post-war progress.
The Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965, but sixty years later, both statutes have been watered down to being non-existent.
America elected its first Black president in 2008 and 2012, only to follow his presidency by electing one of the most openly racist presidents in the country’s history.
America is a deceitful suitor.
It woos and beguiles us with dreams of freedom and opportunity.
It promises us fair treatment but shackles us with literal and figurative chains.
It beckons us to build its infrastructure, fight its wars, and be patiently patriotic while simultaneously spitting on us and calling us the N-word.
When we return home from fighting foreign wars, having experienced a taste of freedom, we are quickly reminded of our subservience.
America is a paymaster who has billions in the bank, but on pay day, issues a check it promptly cancels.
America is Lucy van Pelt holding the football, urging and begging Charlie Brown to kick the football only to snatch the football away at the last minute, leaving Charlie Brown on his back and embarrassed.
Over and over, we have hoped and prayed that America would mean it when it promises to give us the chance to enjoy the American birthright only enjoyed by Whites.
America has lied, connived, and cheated Black people from its first day to this day.
We won’t be surprised if Juneteenth is no longer celebrated as a national holiday.
We won’t be shocked if Congress ratifies its removal and the president signs off on it.
We won’t be caught off guard by anything America does, then undoes.
Because America will only be doing what it has always done.